Question for history buffs

SkittlePoker

Has anyone been watching the new show called "Rome"?

I've seen the first few episodes and they've said something that made me scratch my head. Roman soldiers saying, "Fuck". They used it in the "correct" context but what I was wondering is is this a goof on the writers part?

I've always understood that the word was created in England when to have a child a couple had to have permission from the King. A sign was hung on the door reading "Fornication Under Consent of the King".

I have to do a bit of searching for time lines but I thought that the Roman Empire would have existed before the British Monarchy. If this is the case then I would think that the roman soldiers using this word would be incorrect.

SP

MickeyHoldem

From: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

ETYMOLOGY: Middle English, attested in pseudo-Latin fuccant, (they) fuck, deciphered from gxddbov.

WORD HISTORY: The obscenity fuck is a very old word and has been considered shocking from the first, though it is seen in print much more often now than in the past. Its first known occurrence, in code because of its unacceptability, is in a poem composed in a mixture of Latin and English sometime before 1500. The poem, which satirizes the Carmelite friars of Cambridge, England, takes its title, “Flen flyys,” from the first words of its opening line, “Flen, flyys, and freris,” that is, “fleas, flies, and friars.” The line that contains fuck reads “Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk.” The Latin words “Non sunt in coeli, quia,” mean “they [the friars] are not in heaven, since.” The code “gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk” is easily broken by simply substituting the preceding letter in the alphabet, keeping in mind differences in the alphabet and in spelling between then and now: i was then used for both i and j; v was used for both u and v; and vv was used for w. This yields “fvccant [a fake Latin form] vvivys of heli.” The whole thus reads in translation: “They are not in heaven because they fuck wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge].”

From: NETLORE

Variant #1
Email example contributed by T. McInnis, 22 March 2001:

In ancient England a person could not have sex unless you had consent of the King (unless you were in the Royal Family). When anyone wanted to have a baby, they got consent of the King, the King gave them a placard that they hung on their door while they were having sex. The placard had F.*.*.*. (Fornication Under Consent of the King) on it. Now you know where that came from.


Variant #2
From a Usenet posting, 1 November 1990:

The word fuck comes from colonial times, when someone would be punished for 'prostitution' It was an acronym for the words
'For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge'

FUCK was written on the stocks that held these criminals because For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge was too long to go on the stocks.


Variant #3
From a Usenet posting, 12 October 1990:

I always heard that "F.U.C.K." originated in the 1800's in London, when they used to charge prostitutes "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge". So officer got sick and tired of writing those, um, lessee, 26 characters, not including spaces, so it got abbreviated FUCK and stuck.


Comments: Having consulted the definitive reference work on this subject (yes, there is such a thing: "The F-Word" by Jesse Sheidlower, published by Random House in 1999), we feel confident in dismissing the above claims as imaginative bunk.

orth

Last I checked Romans didn't speak English. Perhaps they had a curse word akin to fuck?